Current and future roles of traditional optimization, social media, public relation, etc. in a holistic online marketing program
Posted June 9th, 2009 by Douglas Patten
While we all know the landscape is rapidly changing, a friend recently asked what the current (best practices) percentages are for a successful online marketing program and what I thought they may be in the future.
I tend to agree with Hubspots general 25% on page 75% off page take on this but I seem to be getting a wide variety of results from other folks I ask. Some say SEO 40% Social Media 40% site architecture 10% and other 10%
I'm curious to know what all your thoughts on this would be......
Thanks!
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You cannot separate
Mike Volpe 2 years 49 weeks 2 days 15 hours ago
You need to do a mix of everything because they all work together.
- Content/blogging powers your SEO
- SEO powers you to get more followers and visitors
- Better content makes you more interesting in social media, getting more followers
- More followers power your content to get more links
Etc.
It is probably a pretty even balance among everything. At least that is how we approach it.
A percentage break down is
Brian Rogers 2 years 49 weeks 2 days 21 hours ago
A percentage break down is hard to share. The reason is the more links and more trust you get from Google, the more effective your on-page will be. So, if you have 10 links and a PR of 1, then I'd say you off-page efforts account for 90% of your rank. If you are wikipedia w/ hundreds of millions of links and an obscene PR, then on-page counts for about 90% of the rank (if wikipedia throws up a page on a new subject, they'll rank quickly).
At the same time, you can see many examples of pages ranking w/ little to no on-page optimization as they have a lot of links w/ proper anchor text or links from pages where the subject matter is similar. In these cases on-page counts for very little of the rank.
So, I really try to avoid saying what % each counts towards. Instead, realize on-page is important to do as it does help, but you should do it, then move on. Don't get bogged down w/ little details (is this alt text better than that, is this header tag stronger, page title stronger, etc.). Once you finish that, then focus on off-page and really work on building links and getting your name out there.
Architecture and Social Media Important as Well
Prashant Kaw 2 years 49 weeks 2 days 23 hours ago
Douglas:
While I do not know what the right breakdown percentage site architecture (depth and linking between pages) plays an important role in how search engines index your site. It is also critical in how seo credit is passed from page to page and diluted if you have too many links on a page.
When it comes to social media - the thinking is that it helps you get more inbound links. It helps you spread your content virally and number of inbound links plus quality of inbound links help dramatically with SEO.
So keeping these two in mind while doing SEO beyond On Page and Off Page optimization is probably a good idea. I would categorize both of these (Social Media and Architecture) under Off Page SEO. So the breakdown On Page / Off Page is probably still the same 25 / 75.
Prashant
SEO vs Marketing Mix
RickBurnes 2 years 49 weeks 3 days 20 min ago
Hi Douglas,
The 25/75 is for on page/off page seo. That's a good rule to live by for seo because it tells you that while the on-page stuff is worth optimizing, the off page stuff is what you need to focus your energy on.
The other numbers you're talking about sound more like the distribution of your marketing mix. What portion of your resources do you put into SEO, blogging, social media, webinars, paid advertising, etc? I don't think it's possible to give as concrete an answer to this question. Every company needs to find their own optimal marketing mix via testing and iteration.
Rick